


A Few Good Wings

by Signel_chan



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Bands of Bandits, Budding Romance, F/M, Family Discovery, Mealtime Shenanigans, Mystery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-10
Updated: 2017-11-24
Packaged: 2019-01-15 20:37:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 22,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12328443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Signel_chan/pseuds/Signel_chan
Summary: For major life changes, one must first ask themselves: is it worth it if it requires nearly dying, thievery, and being subjected to flight-based puns (not necessarily in that order)? If the answer is yes, proceed and good luck. If no, your name is probably Lon'qu and you don't have a choice in being put in the situation of witnessing those events. Good luck.





	1. A Meal Gone Wrong

The arrangement for kitchen duty amongst the ranks of the Shepherds had gotten much more complicated when future children started appearing. Obviously they weren’t going to disallow these kids from joining up with their parents, even if they weren’t _their_ parents and there was no indication that a current-timeline version of any of these children (minus the one already existing) would be made anytime soon. So that meant adding more hands into the kitchen area when mealtimes came around, to provide enough food for the growing army in the trying times they currently were in.

But because people were quick to jump into places where they weren’t necessarily needed, some of the mealtime teams were unbalances and clearly built for gossip purposes rather than productivity. And this was something that bothered Lon’qu, any time he had to step into the kitchen and found the almost unbearable duo of Cordelia and Sumia in there, chattering away while they attempted to bake some kind of dessert to follow his potato-heavy main course. It didn’t matter how long he was in there, or how many different dishes he was cooking to please the appetites of all members of the Shepherds, the two ladies would constantly get on him for the same things, the same way, each and every time.

“You know, you’re going to make someone sick one of these nights,” Cordelia called after him, while he was busy peeling enough potatoes to feed an army their size several times over. “You’ll forget that you have dietary restrictions to adhere to, and you’ll provide the wrong person the wrong meal, and you’ll have everyone breathing down your neck for killing someone with your subpar cooking.”

“Until I see you doing this job rather than your unnecessary one, I won’t hear a word of your nonsense,” he snapped back, not looking up from his potatoes while he spoke. “Why don’t you spend your time focusing on what you do best, and staying far away from me while you’re at it?”

She had a point that he always had to keep in mind, but it wasn’t Cordelia of all people that he wanted to hear it from; the spouse of someone with a food intolerance, or the person themselves, if they’d come to tell him to be careful he’d follow their word without a second thought. Well, that, and if they were preferably not a gossipy female who had no business bothering him while he was working. He hadn’t messed up a meal once and he wasn’t going to as long as he could focus on what he was doing, and Cordelia approaching him to remind him in her condescending way that he needed to keep things in mind wasn’t helping him focus even slightly.

“I don’t get why he does this almost every evening, when there’s so many other people who’d be better at it,” she grumbled, while watching Sumia piece together one of many pies they were making. “Even those who’ve poisoned some of us with their cooking would be better than him, because they at least care about the group as a whole. He doesn’t, he could see half of us dead and he’d think we’re better for it!”

“He’s just focused on his task and he really likes working with potatoes, leave him be.” Just like she always did, Sumia tried to put a stop to the bickering and the hatred shared between the other two, but her words were falling on deaf ears, as Cordelia was not going to drop the issue until Lon’qu knew that he was in the wrong. That was, unfortunately, how it had been since they’d all started being on kitchen duty together, and she knew that there wasn’t going to be anything that stopped it until something big changed for one of the two of them.

Unfortunately, and Sumia knew this, it wasn’t going to be something happening to Cordelia to spark anything; she already was tentatively married and had already met her future child, anything short of grievous injury wasn’t going to change much about her. That meant that if anything was going to budge here, it was going to be on Lon’qu’s end, and she just didn’t see that happening, not when he was a cold, uncaring person to every lady that ever approached him, and the guys he did interact with weren’t exactly thrilled to talk to him either. How was something life-changing and dramatic going to happen to the one person in the world who wasn’t receptive to that sort of thing?

It’d happen eventually, through the luck of the draw, but for it to happen it’d take a meal gone wrong, a Shepherd in the wrong place at the right time, and a few good wings disappearing into thin air.

* * *

There was zero indication beforehand that something bad was about to take place, although the clues should have been there when different hands had been called into the kitchen to help prepare for that day’s after-training meal. “It’s rather dumb that certain members of this army are the ones constantly in here,” Lon’qu grumbled as he rifled through different kitchen tools, looking for the blade he trusted most when peeling potatoes. “Pulled early from the battlefield, and for what? To cook for ungrateful, disrespectful—“

“Soldiers and warriors who are getting to battle alongside their children from the future. You don’t have to take out your frustration on those kids, they’re just doing what they can to help us out, and Chrom’s rewarding them with some family time.” Sumia sighed as she spoke, also feeling the sting of being told that her time for training that day was over before everyone else’s so that she could help cook. “But if it’s any consolation to you, which I’m sure it’s not, at least it’s just me in here today with you?”

A pause, where Lon’qu glared at her as she too took her normal position in the kitchen, by the makeshift oven she always baked with. “I’d prefer that no women were in here with me, but if I have to take the loss I suppose it’s best it’s you and not your overbearing friend.”

“That’s a compliment if I’ve ever heard one.” Watching as he continued looking for his blade, Sumia considered leaving her prep work for a second to help him in his search, but the sound of unfamiliar footsteps entering the area startled her. She was used to Cordelia coming in at the start of cooking, but she knew that she was out training with her daughter, and everyone else who would realistically have been coming in there at that moment was an infantry unit and light on their feet for it. Whoever this was, they weren’t someone whose skill on the battlefield depended on their feet getting them places.

She and Lon’qu both looked to see who it was at the same time, and his disdain for another female presence in the kitchen. “I was asked if I would assist in the meal preparation today, and while watching everyone train was not something I intended on doing, I was planning on spending time with the mounts that are boarded alongside my sweet Minerva, but doing this ruins that, doesn’t it?” Cherche’s laugh was hollow, as was the smile she was showing at the two already in the kitchen, and when she caught Lon’qu and his glare aimed at her she quickly fought him for it. “Is there an issue here? By all means, you can bring it up with me. It’s the meal of your allies you’ll be harming if you do.”

Although her laugh and expression had been meaningless, her words rang with a certain kind of seriousness that Lon’qu dared not to deal with. “No, no issues at all. Just stay on your side of the kitchen and I’ll handle mine.” He held up a blade (not his normal one for potatoes but as close as he was going to get) and turned to start working, only for her to sweep up beside him, her body inches away from his as she looked for tools of her own. Sumia, standing back where she belonged, was trying her hardest to keep from giving audible giggles at the awkward encounter happening in front of her, but when she saw Lon’qu turn and stare, jaw tightly locked in a barely-hanging position, she lost control and bent over the counter, laughing until she cried.

“I fail to see what’s so humorous here,” Cherche dryly said, picking out different spoons and knifes for her own cooking. Her attention was everywhere but on Lon’qu, and he knew that was the case; she wasn’t going to feed into his dislike of women intentionally, but she wasn’t going to avoid him like every other woman tried to do. She was going to live her life the way she wanted to, and he was going to have to deal with it. “Anyway, now that we’ve gotten prepared, is there anything in particular you’re expecting me to cook, or is it my own decision today?” Just like that, she was already bringing it back to their job, and he was still stuck on the fact that this woman was so close to him!

“You decide, it’s not every day there’s someone in here who might know a thing or two about cooking real meals.” He’d clenched his jaw before he spoke, his words coming out forced to make it clear that didn’t want to speak with her at all, but he recognized that he had no choice but to offer clear communication with her. “Just tell me what you want to do with the potatoes today. And no stew, they’ve made far too much stew in my time with the Shepherds and I refuse to do it tonight.”

“I’ll see what I can manage.” Her smile then was still as fake as it had been before, but perhaps that was just the way her face worked. She took up a spot a few paces away from where Lon’qu was, making him grumble that she hadn’t listened about being on her side after all, but with how frequently she was calling for diced, sliced, halved potatoes, it was for the best that she wasn’t any further away.

There was just one thing, aside from her overall presence, that struck him as odd, but he wasn’t going to call her out on it until he knew what she was doing. Never once did it seem like she had a separate meal going for anyone in the army who wouldn’t enjoy a potato-filled meal, which was the standard when on kitchen duty, but with the sheer amount of food she was preparing on her own he assumed he might have missed it. Not like it really mattered to him, he wasn’t going to spend his time worrying about what _she_ was doing, or what the other woman there was doing (which was baking desserts like always), because he needed to focus on his own task. After preparing potatoes he moved onto starting the small pre-meal snacks for everyone, bread slices and salads and things of the sort. They hadn’t always had the time, funds, or manpower to make this worth it, but now that they did, he found that the creation of the appetizer round was enough to keep him busy until the main course was almost done.

He was too occupied with getting what he made set up for everyone to eat while they waited for the rest that he didn’t bother checking to see if that separate meal had been made after all. Normally by that point someone else would have come in to remind the cooks of the dietary needs of the others, but when no one did he could easily have done it for them. But what was the point, the person it was protecting most was a woman, she wasn’t the top priority he wanted to focus on. So the appetizers were made and he took them to the dining hall, the people who’d been out training filing in, tired and hungry, ready to eat what he was providing them with.

Once all of his contributions to the meal were served, he got his plate and took his seat in the furthest table from everyone, where he would sit alone unless someone felt like gracing him with their presence. All his so-called friends had families to spend time with, and they knew that he’d rather them not bring their female friends and children around him at any time, but especially not while eating. As he bit into one of the pieces of bread he’d reheated from the previous night’s dinner, he caught the eye of one such “friend”, who gave him a wave, almost beckoning for him to join where he sat; as soon as his hand dropped Lon’qu saw Cordelia sitting right next to him, stern-faced and looking angry with the world. He wasn’t going to approach that, he was going to revel in the fact that he hadn’t had to deal with her nonsense in the kitchen that evening and that was all he was going to do, he wasn’t going to take up the offer to join her family.

“You’re stupid if you think I’d ever spend my time in the presence of a woman willingly,” he said under his breath, returning a wave to his friend before remembering that, actually, it might just be that he was stupid. “I’d rather dine alone every day for the rest of my life before I spent a minute in her presence on my own time.”

“Ooh cool, who are you talking about?” A plate was set down beside Lon’qu’s, and he broke from his intense fixation on the family across the room to look at the person who’d chosen to sit with him, of all places. Of course it was Henry, who else would be willing to do such a thing without worry about angering a spouse? “You weren’t supposed to look at me. I was going to get up next to you and look where you were looking to answer for myself.”

Raising an eyebrow at what he’d heard, Lon’qu shrugged it off and went back to eating, picking the bread apart before putting pieces in his mouth. “Boy you don’t seem like you’re going to be very talkative tonight, but don’t worry! I can do the talking for the two of us!” Cackling, Henry sat down, scooting up right next to Lon’qu much like Cherche had back in the kitchen, although his disrespect of personal boundaries wasn’t quite as bothersome. “So, how goes it there, new pal? You like death jokes?”

“I like making people’s death threats into jokes,” Lon’qu replied after swallowing down what was in his mouth. “But actual jokes about death, not so much.”

Nodding like he had just heard the biggest news reveal of his life, Henry grinned, his eyes squinting closed like they belonged that way. “I can work with that. Animal jokes are still on the table, right?”

“I’d prefer no jokes, if you’re offering.”

“Okay, no to the joking. We’ll see if that’s a ‘forever’ thing, or if I can get you to change your mind on it eventually.” He cracked one eye open to watch to see if Lon’qu would give any kind of reaction, but when he was met with the same kind of silence and inaction as always, the eye came back closed. “You’re expecting me to make some _crow_ blows, aren’t you?”

Inhaling deeply, Lon’qu raised a hand to point towards a table that was anywhere but where they were currently sitting. “You’ve overstayed your welcome, I’d prefer if you’d leave now.”

“A man makes one crow pun and he’s suddenly getting kicked off the roost! What’s up with that? Where’s your sense of humor?” Lon’qu was about to explain to Henry in simple terms that his sense of humor wasn’t going to be triggered by bad puns, but the mage seemed to understand it without a word being said. He stood back up, leaving his plate where he’d dropped it, and started towards where Lon’qu had been pointing. “Okay, okay, I get it, no need to be so rude! You’re pecking at my eyes here, leave me alone!”

Judging by how he wouldn’t stop laughing as he walked off, it was fairly obvious that Henry saw the whole exchange as a joke anyway, which angered Lon’qu somewhat. He didn’t care to be someone that no one took seriously, like how they treated Henry, and he felt that being subjected to those kinds of jokes would lead to everyone seeing him as if he was that same way. Being averse to women was enough of an issue, having the Shepherds think he wasn’t more than a laughingstock for other reasons wasn’t something he needed.

He went right back to eating, finishing up what he’d grabbed for himself and resisting the temptation to eat off Henry’s plate, when he heard Henry come back to the table, bringing with him two servings of whatever it was Cherche had made for them. “You went to bring the main course?” he asked, confused, as Henry set his meal down in front of him before sitting back down. “After I told you to leave?”

“I’m not that easy to push away, I just come back stronger. And this time, stronger means with food for a new friend! Now eat up, that was all that was left when I got over there. This food’s being scooped up faster than anything!” As Henry laughed, Lon’qu looked at how what he was given seemed to be different than what he’d brought for himself, something interesting as he could have sworn that there weren’t alternate meals made. “Oh, are you confused? I left out the broth part for myself, Cherche said it had bear meat in it and I wasn’t going to submit to eating a cuddly friend today. At least she made more than that for people like me, am I right?”

“I suppose so, although…”  Lon’qu eyed his own food suspiciously. “If she didn’t make any broth without bear meat, she might have forgotten to make parts of the meal without potatoes as well.” He pursed his lips together, before shaking his head. “I’m not worrying with that, if she failed that one simple task that is entirely on her and her planning.”

Henry gave him a once-over, chuckling once he saw how serious Lon’qu was with what he said. “You’re a strange one, mister ‘I don’t like ladies one bit’. What if one of them saved you on the battlefield, huh? What about then?”

“That assumes that I’d be on the battlefield near any of them, but in that instance I would find it within myself to be grateful for their actions.” Lon’qu wasn’t going to allow for the narrative of him despising women to continue being thrown around, when it was more of a dislike that had him wary of them than anything. “Besides, at this time, the focus is on families and children on the battlefield. I have neither here, therefore my fighting time is limited, so there is no reason to worry about what I’d do fighting alongside a woman.”

Tapping a finger to his chin, Henry considered how to reply for a few moments before choosing to forget about things and get to eating, something that Lon’qu appreciated because it meant he could eat as well without seeming to be rude. The two fell silent as they ate what food they had, but the silence was exclusive to only them, as the rest of the people in the dining hall were rowdy and talking up a storm, an ambience that Lon’qu was thankful he wasn’t having to be an active part of. Everyone else too fell silent eventually as they all started focusing more on food than conversation, and in due time the room became quiet aside from the sounds of chewing and cutlery scraping across plates.

But the silence wasn’t meant to be, as the horrified shrieking coming from the furthest table on the other side of the room broke everyone else into a panic. It sounded initially like they were being ambushed during mealtime, but when few people jumped to action and even fewer actually left the room, that turned out to not be the case. Lon’qu was ready to push that disruption from his mind when someone new approached the table, and in ignoring them he caused Henry to tug on his arm violently. “Hey, you’ve got company!”

“I’ve got…what?” Now his attention was drawn to the person who’d come to visit, someone looking a bit shaken and confused but not upset or anything. “Oh, hello there, Stahl. It was odd not seeing you stop by before dinner to make sure everything was to your liking. Is something the matter?”

Judging by how Stahl seemed to be trying to find the necessary words to reply, he knew he was in for a ride of an explanation once those words were discovered. He didn’t even speak before someone else was there to do it for him, a sweeping approach by one of the people Lon’qu never wanted at his table. “I heard what she said when she stormed out, I have no doubt but to believe that Lon’qu is the one responsible for this,” Cordelia said, voice uncaring as she spoke. “He’s always the one insistent on potato usage, he must have let it slip through his mind to make sure that we had a dish prepared without it.”

“I only peeled the potatoes tonight,” he replied, choosing to look at Stahl over Cordelia because of how much he could not stand her. “The one you’re looking to blame here is Cherche, she was the one to do the majority of the cooking, whatever problems you have tonight you need to take up with her. My job was done correctly, she’s the one who failed.”

“Okay, but that doesn’t take back that you know you’re supposed to make sure this doesn’t happen.” Stahl shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other, trying not to let his concern show through too much. “Now I’m never going to hear the end of this, because this only happens on nights when I’m not cooking, but how am I supposed to cook all the time? They get mad that I taste-test everything too much!”

Cordelia, side-eyeing Lon’qu, put a gentle hand on Stahl’s back. “Now, now, don’t put any of the blame for this on yourself. Panne will understand what happened, it’s happened before and it will certainly happen again as long as we have people in the kitchen who don’t care for people like her.” She paused, seeing how Lon’qu stiffened and narrowed his glare at her while she was talking. “Come on, let’s go track her down. Chances are she’s hiding somewhere to suffer until it all passes, we don’t want her to be alone for that, do we?”

That was enough to get the two of them to leave, but as they walked away, Lon’qu was mocking Cordelia’s last words, his face contorted as he tried getting her exact mannerisms down. “You know, I don’t get what your problem with her is,” Henry admitted, not fazed slightly by anything that had happened (even though there was clear disappointment in his eyes that the shrieks hadn’t been someone dying). “She seems like a nice woman! What a shame that she was already taken when I got here, I could use someone like her in my life!”

“There’s always someone else like her, don’t worry.” Lon’qu wondered if maybe Stahl had approached Sumia as well over this or if he knew she wouldn’t have touched anything remotely close to a potato in cooking, before asking himself why, exactly, he cared about what happened to her. “It doesn’t matter, honestly. All women are the same. They blame the men for their shortcomings and guilt us into apologizing for it.”

“Here’s an idea, why don’t you take this into your own hands? You clear your name, you make them learn that you can’t be blamed for this, you feel good about it after!” Henry laughed, bringing a hand to cover his mouth before he started spitting food everywhere in his hysterics. “I’d be your _wing_ man in that case, if you’d be interested!”

Considering the idea for not even a second, Lon’qu shook his head. “I would rather not. My place in fights is with a weapon, not with words. If they choose to blame me, as long as I know my innocence that’s all that matters.” With that, he went back to eating, paying no attention to anything going on around him like he usually did.

Henry wasn’t going to let things go as easily, even though he didn’t have a complete grasp on what was happening, and he made a mental note to press further at Lon’qu when the time came. At that moment, though, he knew that if he was going to help clear his new friend’s name, he had to find the person responsible for what had gone wrong and get her to come clean about everything. But how was he going to do that, when it seemed Cherche had never come into the dining hall after cooking? He’d encountered her in the kitchen when he went to get food, so he couldn’t say that she was ever not in there. Finding her was going to be top priority, and then he’d clear Lon’qu’s name for him.

This wasn’t going to be a one-night fix, but doing nothing right then wasn’t going to help either, so he excused himself with a laugh, running outside without any weapons or reasons to think he’d need one. The moment he was a fair bit away from the door, unable to hear anyone inside or anyone who might have been outside, he tried to summon his raven friends to accompany him on his quest—and found that not a single feather appeared. Not a claw or a beak to be found.

That was odd, and he had the (rather hilarious, in his mind) feeling that it was only going to get odder from there.


	2. Wrong Place, Right Time

Ten minutes before Henry had gone outside, a frantic rabbit-like creature had bound past where he would end up standing, her mind focused on one thing and one thing only: getting as far from the people inside that building as she could. Her thoughts were muddled as she combatted waves of feeling like she was about to die, turning into her Taguel form easily the biggest mistake she could have made in the moment, but Panne was entirely aware that she wanted nothing to do with anyone right then and she needed to escape fast. She knew there would be people chasing her out—there always were—but them finding her would just allow for them to see her in a moment of weakness she had no interest in them watching.

If she had the ability to speak right then, she would have yelled out something about what had put her into her current predicament, but she had to keep her mouth tightly closed for two important reasons. One, making a noise would enable the people looking for her to find her easier, and two, she wasn’t entirely convinced that she’d be able to keep the contents of her sickened stomach down if she opened her mouth. Mentally cursing whoever had cooked the meal that hadn’t been Taguel-proofed was all she was capable of doing at the moment, that and running for her life towards a safe spot.

Her dodging and weaving amongst the trees their camp was set up in resulted in her leaving muddy tracks here and there, but her feet were moving far too fast for anyone to ever be able to make sense of said tracks. And by the time she’d decided on where she was going to hide, the mud had long since dried on her fur and she wasn’t making it obvious to anyone where she was any longer.

The sounds of animals, mounts in specific, were the noise that masked her as she transformed back into her human-like form, only to collapse into the bushes and make quick work of emptying her stomach there. She wasn’t proud of treating herself like an animal alongside them, but in that moment they were going to be more understanding than any of the actual humans would have been, and something about hearing the neighing and the soft movement of wings made her feel a lot safer than she had in the time she’d been falling ill inside the dining hall, or while she’d been running alone.

And just like that, as she brought herself back to her feet to try and get away from the spot she’d claimed, the rustling of wings grew quieter and quieter until it was nothing more than a breeze-like sound, only to disappear altogether. Finding it suspicious, Panne headed directly towards the stables, figuring that she would begin to hear the noises once more; her Taguel ears were typically fantastic at hearing faint noises, so if the flying mounts had chosen to fall asleep right then she would have been able to hear them in their slumber upon approach. But there was nothing to be heard besides the growing sound of horses, and when she popped her head into the stable all she saw was the lightly-armored horses belonging to some of the mounted units, not a single mount with wings present.

“That…does not seem right,” she said, counting on her fingers who she knew would be chasing her down. Her husband, obviously, would be on the hunt, but if he’d come to the stables he’d have grabbed one of the horses, and she could plainly see his mount right in front of her, approaching her as it knew she was friendly. There was one possible person who’d come with who’d have a flying mount, but her tagging along would only potentially explain one missing pegasus, not the pair of them that were gone. “Something has happened here, and if I stay here, they may suspect it was me who did it.”

Backing out of the stables, Panne knew she needed to find a different place to hide while she was feeling unwell and didn’t want human company, but finding one was going to be harder now that there seemed to be animals missing. She’d easily become the prime suspect for their disappearance, due to her being the only one not in the dining area when they disappeared, and having to shoulder those accusations when all she’d been doing was trying to save her dignity because someone basically poisoned her wasn’t anything she wanted to have to do.

She felt she had no other option but to transform into her rabbit form once more and make a break for it, but where would she go? The stables were somewhere that she’d have had company while being able to be found when she was ready, anywhere else and there was a chance that she wouldn’t be discovered and people would panic. Putting that kind of stress on the few people she cared about wouldn’t be fair to them, but at the same time, making her fall ill because of a food intolerance she’d made well-known wasn’t fair to her. So she transformed again, away from the stables a few steps so that she didn’t startle the remaining mounts, and she was about to start deciding where to go when a single bird landed on the top of her head, cawing as if it was calling for someone. “Get off of me,” she slowly said, her voice echoing and amplified in volume. “I have no use for a bird like you.”

The bird cawed again, plucking at her head with its claws, which caused her to jolt forward to try and knock it off. Her efforts proved useless when the bird refused to let go, and in fact continued pulling harder at her fur. She was trapped as she was now, unable to transform back without harming or killing the bird, and she wasn’t quite ready to deal with a dead-or-dying animal attached to her scalp when she went back to human form. “What do you _want_ , bird?” she asked, hoping she’d get some response that she could make sense of.

The only response was a cackle, followed by a second bird landing on her, taking perch on one of her ears. Now there were two cawing pests attached to her, and there still wasn’t a thing she could do about it! This was starting to be a problem, as their claws became something she wasn’t going to simply be able to ignore, and that meant she’d have to do something drastic soon to knock them off before…

Her thought was cut off as another bird made her other ear its resting place, and she had to resist yelling out for them to get off. It would be beyond embarrassing if someone were to find her like this, slowly being covered by birds she didn’t ask for, but thanks to how they were crowing and cawing her ability to hear if someone was coming was severely limited. This was how she, a proud Taguel warrior, last of her kind, would be remembered: as a nesting place for stupid birds. The jokes that would be made about her were already crossing her mind before they even had a chance to be a thing, and she wasn’t going to allow for them _to_ become a thing. There had to be something she could do to escape this feathery hell, but what it was she wasn’t sure.

Bolting through the woods trying to shake the birds off might not have been it either, but it was what she ended up doing when she could make out someone calling her name over the sound of the birds having the time of their lives. She wasn’t going to be seen like this, not if she could help it, and that meant running away with no idea of how far she’d go and how long she’d be gone.

The forest never seemed to come to an end, the trees thicker in places than others and in some spots too dense for her to get through in her current form, but at least that meant no one was going to be following her. It was just her, the trees, and those three birds still attached to her. Growing disappointed that even her break-neck speed wasn’t throwing them off, she stopped running once the forest thinned out a bit, the only indication of where she’d been before the path of crushed plants that she left in her wake. “How am I going to rid myself of you feathered beasts?” she grumbled, shaking her head and finding the birds still clinging on as if she was the only thing keeping them alive. “You are making my eventual return to civilization that much harder, I hope you know.”

With how they squawked and ruffled their wings, it was made clear to Panne that they did not care how much they were adding to her bad situation. They were getting a free ride from someone and that was what mattered to them, even if it was at the cost of her becoming horribly separated from where the Shepherds had made their camp. How was it that she’d been in the wrong place at the right time to not only find out that the mounts were missing, but to have these birds make her their mount? What kind of divine justice was working towards punishing her, starting with her getting sick off potatoes and ending up with her in the forest with three birds attached to her head?

As it would turn out, the punishment it was working for wasn’t actually aimed at _her_ , but there was no way she was going to figure that out right then. At the moment, it was time to get the birds off her head without harming herself or being shamed for letting it happen, and as she began wandering back along the path she’d created for herself she wondered if that would happen before everyone back at camp had turned in for the night.

* * *

Back to where Henry stood, he tried calling for his feathered companions again, finding no luck in summoning them. “That’s weird, normally they’re right here to follow me wherever I want to go,” he said, sticking a finger to his lips so he could loudly whistle, as if the shrill noise would summon any kind of bird to his location. “Huh, must be their dinner break too. Now what was I doing out here again? Finding Cherche, right? How hard can that be, if she’s out here she’s got to be with her wyvern, and that makes finding her easy.”

He was under the impression that she’d been outside longer than anyone else, judging by how she’d never come into the dining area, but before he could take as much as a few steps from the door he could feel a presence behind him, following him. He turned to see who it was, expecting Lon’qu or one of the people who had initially come out searching, and he was met with an emotionless face and long, pink hair. “Why are you out here? What attachment to the sickened woman do you have?” Cherche’s question felt accusatory, as if she was trying to get him to admit some kind of accomplice to the crime that he didn’t have. “You need to go back inside and let those of us responsible take control.”

“Yeah, see, Lon’qu said he wasn’t going to do that so I decided I’d come in his place!” Henry laughed like he always did, but when she didn’t even crack a smile at his statement his laughter slowly faded into nothing. “Geeze, you’re just as cold as he is, I thought maybe if I got to talking to you it’d go over a lot better than talking to him had.”

“My apologies that I don’t take everything as a joke like you do. Now if you’re out here in his place, despite it being my careless mistake that caused this to happen, you’re forcing him to hold some guilt here. Is that what you want?” It wasn’t what he wanted at all, and Henry would have been down for going back inside and letting Lon’qu know that his name was already cleared, but he felt like he needed to remain involved for certain reasons involving birds that had disappeared. When he nodded, a large grin on his face, she blinked slowly in his direction before sighing. “Well, I suppose it’ll be nice to have someone else to share the blame with. Just stay out of my way as I help find the woman and we’ll get along just fine.”

She started walking off on her own, and Henry considered ducking back inside for a grand total of three seconds, before he chased after her, the hem of his robes dragging against the ground. “Say, you’re kind of harsh, aren’t you? Wouldn’t you want a friendly face working with you through this?”

“The only being I want working with me is my Minerva,” she replied, not batting an eyelash that Henry had broken the one request she’d made. “Which is why I am currently heading towards the stables, so I can unhook her from whatever chain they’ve put her in and allow for her to join me on this adventure.”

Clasping his hands together, Henry nodded enthusiastically as he heard Cherche’s plan. “I can’t wait to get to meet your wyvern, I bet she’s a real beauty! That, or a real hungry thing, I hope she doesn’t see me as her next meal!” His laughter once again trailed off when Cherche didn’t laugh along, and he dropped his hands to his sides, focusing more on keeping up with her insanely quick pace than anything else. “Do you let your wyvern have friends? I’d love to get to be her friend if you’d let me be.”

“I am the only friend she currently needs, but if that changes I suppose you could be on the list for consideration.” Closing her mouth tightly after she spoke, Cherche looked around at the trees surrounding where they’d made camp, looking for any trace of someone having been in them. Her silence made Henry try to fill it, whistling once again to attempt summoning his birds, and when nothing happened he sighed, hanging his head and causing her to turn back to look at him. “Is something the matter?”

He shrugged. “Not really sure you actually care if something’s the matter. I’d have thought you’d prefer me being down to me cracking jokes and laughing all the time.”

“I may be serious most of the time but I do care when the people surrounding me are faced with issues, would you be so kind as to tell me what’s bothering you?” While he broke into the short story of how he’d come outside to start looking for her and ended up being unable to summon the birds he liked hanging around, they made their approach towards the stables, and the last sentences of his story (which actually recounted their entire journey up to the point they were now at) were told with them standing outside of where the mounts were kept. She excused herself without commenting on his story, telling him she’d be right back with her wyvern, but the next time he saw her she didn’t have anything with her that she hadn’t before, and her face was showing a rare glimpse of panic.

“Now who’s the one having issues?” he teased, trying not to laugh again. “Weren’t you going to grab your wyvern? What happened to that? Couldn’t find a way to get her to let me ride her?” He was met with silence, which he took as her trying to process the humor in what he’d said. “Oh, it’s okay, take your time, I know I’m hilarious.”

“I cannot grab something that’s not here. Some bandits must have come and taken my Minerva hostage, as well as some of the other mounts.” Her words were serious, but Henry being who he was, he struggled taking them as seriously as he was supposed to. When the first snicker escaped his lips, she narrowed her eyes and snapped, “Can you please not laugh when there could be dead mounts somewhere in these woods?”

“Dead mounts? Did something get out?” The words were asked with a breathless feminine voice, and the two standing there turned and watched as Cordelia and Stahl approached the two, both clearly having been looking around for the missing person. Cherche nodded, which made Cordelia stop in her tracks, hunching over to catch her breath for a second before looking back up and tilting her head to the side. “Well, what did? You are going to tell us, aren’t you?”

“I would much rather you see for yourself.” Already it seemed like Cherche was giving up what she had set out to do, her mind focused on the new issue at hand, but when Cordelia, fed up with not getting straight answers, pushed past her, she followed her into the stables for some reason or another.

That left Henry outside with Stahl, who on top of looking like he’d been running around frantically also looked like he was extremely worried. “I don’t think anything bad’ll happen to Panne if we don’t find her,” he said, glancing towards the dark forest, “but at the same time, she’s not feeling well and that means she could be vulnerable to someone attacking her. I can’t let that happen to her, but I’m not the kind of guy who’d be best at protecting her right now, I don’t think.”

“We could always just burn the trees down, see if that helps find her,” Henry suggested, hearing the shocked gasp he got in return. “Oh come on, it was just a joke. She’s basically an animal, she knows how to survive. I lived by myself in the wilderness before, it wasn’t fun but I didn’t die from it, she’ll be fine out there too. Getting stressed is going to be a lost…” He motioned towards his shoulder, where he figured a bird would have been sitting by then, but he found it to still be without a feathered pal. “…cause. A lost cause.”

“You’re right, there’s no point in getting stressed.” Not having noticed that Henry had been trying to make a pun, Stahl gave a weary sigh before looking to his companion. “Since Cordelia’s still in there with Cherche, mind coming with me to go see if we can find Panne on our own? It’s best to go with a partner, you know.”

While Henry would have loved to see what the women’s conversation was going to be when they came out of the stables, he could hear the tinges of worry in Stahl’s voice and he didn’t want to leave him hanging. “Sure thing, I’ll have your back while you look, since only one of us is armed in case of trouble!” He threw his arms up, but noticing that this joke too fell flat, he dropped them to his sides and grinned. “I mean, I have a tome under my robes in case we’re ambushed.”

The two set off, following what tracks they could find that had been made by an animal of some kind, and so when the two ladies left the stables they found that they were there alone. “Well, at least Stahl isn’t here to bug us about helping him find his spouse, when we have mounts to go searching for,” Cordelia remarked, visibly shaken that she’d just found out her pegasus was missing. “Should we go get Sumia, since she’s involved in this too?”

“No, the two of us can wrangle two beasts and Minerva if we come across them, there’s no need to lose that precious time by getting her.” Cherche was grimacing, looking towards the night sky to see if there was any sign of her wyvern amongst the clouds. “How peculiar, them getting out together. I hope there are no poachers in these woods, our Taguel friend may meet the same fate as our mounts if there is…”

“I sure wish I had your optimism.” Speaking with sarcasm in her voice, Cordelia sighed, before taking in a deep breath and turning away from both camp and the thickest part of the forest. “Now let’s go check where the training drills were earlier today, perhaps our mounts decided they wanted more time on the battlefield.

* * *

 

Inside the dining hall, a sense of normalcy had been returned after people had left, everyone who was still there finishing up their meals before heading off to do their own things for the rest of the night. Lon’qu sat alone, exactly as he liked it, and didn’t think for a second about the man who had joined him for the meal and hadn’t yet returned. He wasn’t even thinking about Cherche and how she’d basically ruined his time spent in the kitchen peeling potatoes. All that was on his mind was how after he was done eating, he was going to go out to the training field and get in some one-on-one time with his sword.

Just the thought of some swordplay made his eating speed pick up, wanting to be the first person out there so he wasn’t sharing a field with lovey couples who’d already gotten their time out there when he’d been forced to come in to prepare dinner. He wasn’t going to let them get their way just because there were more than one of them, and they were already getting priority treatment from everyone else.

Across the room, Sumia sat at her table, watching Lon’qu with curious eyes, seeing how he sped up on eating until he was done, then left without clearing his dishes or saying anything to anyone. “He didn’t even stay for dessert,” she softly said, thinking about the lovely pies she’d made for everyone, but his hastiness in getting up worried her. This was a man who was alone and had very few people he ever interacted with, what if he was going out to betray them or something? He had to be trustworthy, he’d been with them for so long and had been so loyal, and she was sure Chrom and his tactician wife wouldn’t have let a traitor stay among them, but what if something had changed?

No one seemed to be paying attention to him, so she took it upon herself to follow him out, watching as he picked up his sword at the door before taking off into the night. She stayed a fair bit behind him, never able to be as fast on her feet as he was in fear of tripping and losing all progress, but when the training field came into view she realized that she’d been tailing him for basically nothing. This wasn’t a man going out to do bad things, this was just a man going out to get some late-day practicing in with his weapon.

“If you thought I didn’t know you were there, you’d be wrong.” His words came as a surprise to her, because she’d been turning to go back to where everyone else was, no longer interested in keeping tabs on him. “Why did you follow me? You should know how I feel about you, why bother with me?”

She looked back at him over her shoulder, the fear of him coming at her with that sword in his hand crossing her mind. “I wanted to make sure you were okay. It’s late, you shouldn’t be out by yourself.”

“And yet that doesn’t apply, if you came out here but went to turn back anyway.” He took a swing at a tree, the strike against its thin trunk enough to topple it in one blow. “Either admit your plan or get lost.”

Words weren’t going to come to her, that fear starting to take hold without relenting. “I-I-I’ll just go,” she stammered, before breaking into a run back towards camp. Whatever he might be planning out there wasn’t worth fearing for her life and she’d just let someone at camp know he was out there, so that if he went missing they at least knew where to start looking.

As she ran, she could hear what sounded like more small trees being felled, Lon’qu quick at work on taking out his aggressions against the wildlife. But then there was the loud neighing, the whinnying that sounded familiar to her yet didn’t seem to belong—was that her imagination playing tricks on her, or was that a pegasus belonging to a Shepherd? She could have turned back and checked, but something told her that approaching Lon’qu again would not end well at all. She’d have to leave it alone and call it a night, no matter how much she was curious as to what might have been going on.

Where he stood, Lon’qu also heard the noise but paid it no attention, focusing more on checking his blade for chips after getting it stuck in a tree for a few seconds. “If you’re here to bother me again, I’ll show you a reason why to never consider doing that,” he grumbled, before the neighing happened once more, right behind where he stood. He tensed up, turning to see what was there, but he was met with nothing but the night and the lonely training field.

Oh, and the quickly-approaching figures of Cherche and Cordelia, both of whom had heard the same noise he and Sumia had and were coming to see if they could find the culprit. When they found him there, and no pegasi or wyvern to be seen, it was hard to not jump to the assumption that he’d been involved with the disappearance to begin with, but hadn’t he stayed inside to begin with? Why would he have come out when the original reason people had left had something to do with a woman?

The plot was only thickening, and no one knew what was happening or what was going to happen next; the one constant was that things were going missing, and it was going to be up to those still outside to figure things out, lest they leave it for the following day.


	3. A Few Good Wings

“Do you think he has anything to do with their disappearance?” Cordelia whispered to Cherche, watching her fists curl at the idea. “I mean, the chances of it being possible are slim to none, but why else would he be outside right now?” She was just voicing the first idea that had come to mind when they’d come to the field to see Lon’qu there, after having heard the distinct sounds of a pegasus in the area. “Should we confront him about it?”

There were many things that Cherche was known for, but her being tolerant of anything happening to her wyvern was not one of them. “I don’t want confrontation, I want Minerva back before she is harmed, or before I harm someone to get information.” Her arms shaking, she nudged Cordelia with a shoulder to get her to approach Lon’qu, something she was hesitant to do judging by how she dragged her feet. “Go on, you be the one speaking with him. Your emotional bond with what’s missing isn’t as strong as mine.”

Sighing, Cordelia gave in to what was being asked of her, and she stepped closer to Lon’qu, watching his spirits sink when he realized he wasn’t alone out there any longer and that these women were real. “There is no need for all this interruption,” he said, not having moved since before the pair had come as close as they had. “I merely stepped outside for some training to clear my mind, you can leave me be and get back to looking for the rabbit woman. I’m sure she’d be thrilled for someone to find her.”

“She still has someone looking for her,” Cordelia replied, coming closer still despite Lon’qu visibly tensing up as she approached, “and that’s fine because we have bigger issues to handle. Someone’s stolen all flying mounts the Shepherds have and we need to find them.”

“Sounds like a personal problem.” Lon’qu spoke dryly, flatly, and the uncaring tone to his voice made Cordelia start to anger. “I have nothing to do with their disappearance and I would rather you leave me alone while you handle things yourself.”

He was looking past Cordelia, back at Cherche, and his eyes were narrowing as he saw her turn her attention from the dark skies she’d been looking into down towards him. “H-hey, don’t ignore me being here!” Cordelia waved her hand in front of Lon’qu but he wasn’t paying her any attention at that point, dropping his sword as he started briskly walking past her to go confront the other woman out there. “And don’t walk straight at her, oh gods what are you thinking of doing right now?”

See, Lon’qu firmly believed, after having enough time to think about what had gone down in the kitchen earlier, that Cherche had intentionally tried making him look bad. Henry had come outside to try and set her straight, even though he hadn’t wanted that battle to be fought, but now she was in his territory, impeding on him getting to spend his night how he wanted. She must have had some kind of grudge against him and was actively trying to ruin his life more than her existence already did, and he was going to put a stop to that.

With Cordelia on his heels, asking him what he was doing (but he was ignoring her, she was never much of a help and always seemed to chide him for what she thought he was doing wrong), he approached Cherche and came to a stop when she stretched a shaking arm out towards him, almost as if reaching for him to still come closer. “How curious, you’ve come this far, why not come all the way?” she asked, voice as emotionless as always but there was audible malicious intent carried within it. “I would find it enjoyable to have you closer as we discuss what’s gone wrong.”

“What’s gone wrong is that you poisoned someone and made it seem like I deserved the blame for it,” he replied, before feeling Cordelia grab his arm and he turned violently to look at her. “Why are you touching me, woman? Unhand me at once!”

“You’re picking a fight with someone who doesn’t need to be fought right now.” Although she did do as Lon’qu demanded and let go of him, it didn’t mean Cordelia was going to back away and leave the conversation. “Cherche is incredibly distraught by Minerva being missing, and you’re not helping her bad attitude by having your own.”

“I’m being preached at by someone who’s constantly negative towards me, cute.” He was thankful that she’d let go of him, but Lon’qu wasn’t thrilled with being spoken to like he was. “I have done absolutely nothing wrong here, I have merely been filling my duties as a member of the Shepherds yet you both seem to have taken issue with me!”

Inhaling deeply, Cherche tilted her head back to look up at the sky once more, just in case there was a wyvern-shaped figure amongst the stars. “I have taken no issue with you, it seems that you are the one who’s done that to me. I merely want my Minerva back, and anyone who’s outside right now may be of some use in helping find her.”

Lon’qu shook his head. “I am not helping you. You’re capable of finding her on your own, don’t drag me down into your search.”

“How about we all search together?” Cordelia suggested, to which one person agreed and one person disagreed, but since two people were on one side and the third was on the other, she was going to get her way and Lon’qu was going to have to suck it up and deal with these two women until they found the wyvern. He was really regretting deciding to go outside to train after all, and it was only going to get worse…

Sumia had managed to get away without either Cherche or Cordelia noticing that she’d been outside, so she was unaware that they were looking for something relevant to her. In fact, she was unaware that Cordelia wasn’t still helping Stahl search for his missing Taguel companion, and so when she saw two men emerge from the woods, one of them being Stahl, she was slightly confused. “Where did Cordelia go?” she asked, running up to the two and trying to ignore that Henry looked like he was trying to resist laughing. “You didn’t lose her, did you?”

“Split up when she and Cherche never came out of the stables, we couldn’t keep standing around with Panne still missing.” Stahl rubbed at his arm, feeling a bit awkward that he still hadn’t found who he was looking for. “She’s really gone this time, and I don’t know what to do to find her. Do I just hope she comes back on her own?”

Sumia tilted her head to one side, then shifted it to the other, as she thought about a possible suggestion to give him. “Ooh, I know! How about we get on my pegasus and go flying above the trees to find her? She can’t stay hidden from above!” She was eager to see their reactions, but when both men looked at each other before shaking their heads at her. “W-what? Come on, we could all fit on there!”

“I guess they’re missing too, Sumia.” Stahl’s voice cracked halfway through his sentence, and he sighed when he saw her hopes of being helpful come crashing down. “That’s what Cordelia and Cherche were looking for, they don’t know where their mounts are or they’re dead out in the woods or something.”

“That’s bad, that’s really bad.” Her mind was beginning to run in circles as she tried to figure out another suggestion she could make, but Henry’s loud laugh snapped her to focusing on him. “What’s so funny to you, huh? My pegasus is maybe dead and you’re laughing?”

“I’m not laughing about that, that’s no laughing matter at all, no way!” Bringing a hand to cover his mouth, Henry took in a few breaths to calm himself before explaining his behavior. “I’m just thinking about how hilarious this all is, how funny is it that Panne goes running out the same night that the flying mounts go missing? And not only that, but my bird friends have disappeared too!” He was laughing again anyway, which was concerning to the two people he was with but this was Henry they were talking about, he was going to laugh even if the situation was inappropriate for the behavior.

But the idea he’d presented was something to think about, and undoubtedly it was going to be something on their minds as they went through their searching, because the night was still young and as long as things weren’t where they belonged they still had time to search. Moments later, the trio from the training field came onto the scene, Lon’qu nearly being dragged by the two women as they started heading towards the stables to resume their search from that point. With the six of them in the same area, after sharing what information everyone had and deciding that mounts were replaceable (except for Minerva, Cherche constantly asserted), they divided up into three pairs to get back to looking for Panne and where she might have gotten off to.

This was, naturally, a bad idea because of the six of them, one person wanted nothing to do with anything, one person was focused more on making bad jokes, one was thinking more about one of the missing mounts than the missing person, and the other three had relatively open minds. If it were a perfect world, each of the three who could focus on the major task would take one of the distracted ones as their partner, but things weren’t going to shake out that way, not when it was normally Cordelia and Stahl working together to begin with. “You four figure out who’s going with who,” she demanded, before adding in a last-second threat, “and if I catch word that you bailed out on this, I will personally be the one to tell Chrom you put your personal issues before the well-being of a member of the Shepherds.”

“Please, I’ll thank you a million times over for this, and I’m sure Panne will too when we find her!” Stahl sounded thankful already, even though no action had been made, and when the two of them disappeared out into the woods everyone thought, at least for a moment, that it was best to follow through with what they wanted them to do.

That was, until someone suggested how to divide up. “Uh, how do we make this work?” Sumia asked, looking at who she was standing there with. She knew Lon’qu well enough from working in the kitchen with him, and Cherche had been a constant in the stables ever since she’d come to work with the Shepherds, but Henry was a bit of a wild card and she wasn’t sure she wanted to put up with his joking habits. “Anyone have anyone special they want to be with?”

“Henry,” Lon’qu said, nearly cutting her question off. “If I have to participate in this search party, I want to be with him and no one else.”

“That’s a shame, because I don’t think you can be trusted with him.” Without hesitation or even caring that he was going to not like what she was doing, Cherche grabbed Lon’qu by the arm and pulled him into her. “You’ll be with me, so we can patch up whatever issues it is we seem to have had crop up between us.”

Over the sounds of him spitting retorts and rebuttals to her demand, Sumia looked at Henry, her shoulders sagging as she saw him laughing at what had just happened to Lon’qu. “I guess that means it’s the two of us, huh?” He didn’t respond, choosing to instead continue laughing at his pal’s demise, and she gave a small nod while accepting that that’s how it was going to be. “I got it, let’s get going before it gets to be too late and people start getting worried that we aren’t going to be coming back, ever.”

“Do you think anyone would actually do that?” he asked between chuckles, and she shrugged, because she wasn’t sure at all. Were enough of them that were outside right now important to Chrom and the other important members of the Shepherds? Her face must have given away that she was torn up about the possibility that none of them mattered enough to anyone else, because he stopped his laughing entirely and approached her, arms opening for a hug. “Come here, they’d do that if most of us didn’t come back. You especially, I’m sure.”

She hesitated on taking up his hug offer, but his words seemed so genuine and so pure, there was no way she was going to find anyone else right then that would be so understanding of her doubts on her importance. “Thanks, Henry,” she said as she ran into his arms, him wrapping her up and even lifting her a few inches up off the ground in his excitement to be holding someone, and she giggled when she felt her feet touching nothing but air and his robes. “You’re the sweetest!”

“I try, something’s got to be sweeter than the embrace of death, so I figure, why not let that be me?” He was setting her down, assuming that his comment would have been off-putting to her, but when she was still looking at him with shining eyes and a newfound eagerness to be near him, he realized he hadn’t screwed up as bad as he thought. This was going to be a fun adventure, the two of them working together, and he hoped he wasn’t too forward in grabbing hold of her hand before dragging her out into the woods with him, following the same path he and Stahl had followed earlier in search for Panne.

On the other side of the spectrum, Cherche was also doing some dragging, and Lon’qu was resisting as much as he could, but they were headed in the opposite direction from where the others were as they moved. “I understand that looking for the Taguel is what everyone else is going to be focused on,” she explained as she kept dragging without caring how much he didn’t want to be attached to her, “but I have a duty as a companion to Minerva to make sure that I know exactly where she is at all times. We are finding her, first and foremost, and then we can rejoin the others in their search.”

“I don’t know why you keep saying ‘we’, I want no part of this and I need you to understand that!” They were heading back towards the training grounds, and Lon’qu hoped she was intending on dropping him off there before going off on her own. “Let me go and let me do as I wish, if you don’t I may have to resort to harming you.”

“With what weapon? You dropped your blade when you came to confront me, you willingly disarmed yourself and now you have to face those consequences.” She sounded so smug as she spoke, something that she coupled with the smirk upon her lips that normally remained flat and tight as she was talking. “You have nowhere to go but with me, and if you choose to continue resisting, well, I’ll have to feed you to Minerva when I find her.”

“If you find her,” he reminded her, causing her to gasp in shock that he would dare say such a thing. “Face it, someone may have murdered her by now, and you may never see her again. What do you do then? Cry about it?”

Her smirk had faded, she was back to showing no emotion, and she continued pulling him along almost as if he hadn’t offended her at all. “I’ll move past it in whatever way I can, I’m aware that losing Minerva is a possibility I am always faced with, but I doubt I will be dealing with that here. We will find her, together, and when we come away from this we will be better off for it.”

“That’s what you think, anyway.” The truth was, Lon’qu had no interest in learning to grow from what he was getting forced into doing. He was going to remain belligerent until he was allowed to go back to doing his own thing, and if that meant impeding progress in Cherche’s search for her dear wyvern all night, he was just going to do it. He wasn’t going to hurt her physically—even though he didn’t care for women, he could respect them enough to not get rough with them and look like a bad guy for it—and he wasn’t going to abandon her the first chance he got. He’d stick around as long as he was forced to, but not a second longer.

If he had known that by the time he was given the choice to retreat, he’d be too deep into things for it to be possible, he would have put up more of a struggle to get away.

* * *

Panne was exhausted, running while still feeling ill was taking its toll on her and she needed to find somewhere safe to stop and turn around. But every time she thought about that being her last bit of escaping, one of the birds still attached to her would peck at her, making her run faster. She wasn’t going to let herself be found while carrying around those dumb birds, even if she was certain someone back at base camp would be able to help her get rid of them. They seemed like the kind of birds that the weird dark mage always seemed to have swarming around him, so she was sure he’d know what to do about them calling her their nest for the evening.

Her run started to slow down as the forest began thickening once more, the birds on her getting caught on branches and loudly squawking to let her know that her trying to squeeze through the underbrush wasn’t going to work with them present. “I don’t care about your well-being,” she grumbled, voice booming through the otherwise silent forest, earning more pecks. “Leave me alone, will you?”

The birds’ answer to that was to begin squawking nonstop, causing her to try running faster once more. She wasn’t going to get any peace or quiet out there with those guys on her, so why should she bother laying low and hiding with them still around? There was only one thing she could do at that point, and that was run until they let their little claws free of her fur and flew away. Except it was a very real possibility that they weren’t going to do that, and if they never did, she could never go back.

The question of why they were still so attached to her did cross her mind a time or two, but she never entertained it because as far as she was concerned, these were just three dumb birds that got confused about a giant rabbit bounding around. There wasn’t meant to be some kind of explanation for their idiotic decision to ride on her, they were just doing what they thought was best for them.

So when Panne broke through the forest and came to a clearing that she’d never seen before, filled with feathers of different sizes and colors, she was initially thankful that she’d gotten out of the forest, before noticing that the birds had detached themselves from her. “It’s about time you did that,” she said, transforming back to her human form so that she could shake out her limbs and look around the new place she’d found. “Now where am I, hm? I wonder if anyone’s ever been here before, it looks…soft.”

She bent down to pick up a feather off the ground when a bird, possibly one of the ones who had hitched a ride on her to this place, landed on her back, pecking at her bare skin. Standing back up with still-empty hands, she went to brush the bird off, but as she turned to do so, she saw what looked to be a pegasus there in the clearing, muzzled with its wings bound behind it. “Oh gods, what have I walked into? You poor thing, the man-spawn must be holding you captive, let me help free you if I can.”

Her hands and arms were shaking as she worked to break through the ties binding the pegasus in its current state, exhaustion setting in with every tug she made on the ropes on its wings. “Please, do not fear me, I am only here to assist you in finding freedom,” she whispered as she worked, trying to keep the pegasus calm. Something about it was familiar, but in the dark and in her tired state she wasn’t quite sure what it was, although she was sure that the realization would come upon her soon enough. It wasn’t until she had broken through the ropes and it was flapping its wings to make sure they were still usable that she noticed the colors on its saddle, denoting that it was a pegasus belonging to one of the Shepherds. “How strange, why would you be out here without your rider?”

After she’d gotten the muzzle off, she had intended to investigate the pegasus for any kinds of trauma it may have sustained in getting transported to the clearing, but the moment it was freed it took flight, leaving her sight in a matter of seconds. Rather than shapeshift to chase it down, she shrugged the loss off and went back to looking around the clearing to see what it had to offer. There were far too many feathers laying around for this to be just a random place in the woods, after all.

The pegasus did what it could, whinnying as it flew over the woods until it found someone else who could possibly help it, passing by the base camp as well as where some of the people out searching for its savior were looking, because they were too entrenched in the trees for it to make a safe landing. It was familiar with anyone who typically went into the stables to find their mounts, it only needed to get one person to help it out, and it wasn’t going to land until that person (not even its rider) was found.

“Do you hear that?” Cherche asked, letting go of Lon’qu finally when the sound of wings flapping came to her ears. “We must be getting close! Don’t worry, Minerva, whatever monster stole you from right under our noses will be made to pay for what they’ve done soon enough, I am sure of it!”

Looking up, Lon’qu sighed and shook his head. “That’d be a great threat to make if we were being greeted with your wyvern. Looks like it’s just a pegasus.”

“A pegasus can still lead us to Minerva,” she reminded him, shaking her finger in his face much to his continued dismay. “And don’t think I was unable to tell this wasn’t my wyvern approaching us, Minerva doesn’t have feathers on her wings and therefore does not make the same noise this beauty does in flight.” She too was looking at the beast as it descended upon them, smiling when she recognized the saddle and knew exactly who normally rode upon it. “This is Cordelia’s pegasus, she’ll be thrilled to know it’s come home safe and sound. Once we’ve used it to find Minerva, that is.”

“Hold on, _we’re_ going to use it?” Lon’qu stepped backwards, away from Cherche and from where the pegasus had gathered its footing on the ground. “I would rather walk, thank you very much. Riding mounts is not something I’m particularly interested in.”

“What a shame that you have no idea how to get back to camp without my guidance then, isn’t it?” She was teasing him, showing that she had complete control of their current situation. “If only you’d come along with me willingly, perhaps then I would have made sure to let you know how to find your way back…”

There were two options as to what he could do, neither of which were preferred but Lon’qu knew he had to choose one or the other. The first was to accept defeat, to let Cherche know she’d won after all, and spend the rest of the night at her mercy until they found her wyvern and were able to go back to camp and pretend nothing had ever happened. The second was to try and take things into his own hands and find his way back on his own, but he was unarmed and hopelessly lost, and if he managed to lose his way even more there was a real chance that he would never return alive. The choice he had to make was obvious, but getting him to admit to it was going to be akin to pulling teeth.

“I…suppose I’ll ride the pegasus with you,” he eventually said, jaw locked and words coming out in a grumbled tone. “But no getting close to me on there, I require my space.”

“As if there’s space to be given on the back of a pegasus, but I’ll see what I can do.” She spent a few minutes carefully stroking the mane of the winged horse, getting it to trust her, before she motioned for him to jump on. “You have to be gentle when mounting it, or else you’ll spook the poor thing into bolting. It’s already far from where it belongs and asking for help, you do not want to add to its distress right now.”

He sighed, shoulders sagging as he did. “Fair enough, but don’t touch me as I get on. Your hands need to stay far away from me for as long as possible.” After steeling himself for getting on the back of this horse, he made his approach too quickly and was barely half-on when the pegasus was spooked, jumping into the sky with him hanging on in a position not fit for riding. The wings beat against his face for the duration of the flight, until Cherche was able to call for it to take to the ground once more, so that she could assist Lon’qu into a proper riding position before taking her own.

He was so shaken by the sudden flight that he didn’t have it in himself to chide her for touching him as she got him situated on the saddle, nor could he be bothered to call her out for wrapping her arms around him as she took hold of the pegasus’ reins to get it up into the air under her control. She knew what she was doing, and if it meant he was going to have to look past her close contact with him, that was what he needed to do in order to get out of this whole ordeal alive.

With a few good wings still missing and a pair underneath them, they set off into the night sky, the pegasus leading its riders to where it had last been held captive in order for some further investigation of the scene.

 


	4. The Bandits

Hidden just beyond the edge of the clearing was a group of bandits, camped out amongst the trees and waiting for anyone to have come into their workplace to try and undo what they’d done. When they saw that it was a giant rabbit woman who appeared, they thought twice about accosting her and making her pay for disrupting their work, but the moment that rabbit set their pegasus free and started looking around for anything else, picking up feathers along the way, they had a general understanding that they were in trouble. Those kinds of shapeshifters weren’t something you saw every day, or ever, but they weren’t anything anyone wanted to mess with.

This was supposed to have just been a simple “steal some mounts and get out” job, there shouldn’t have been as much trouble as there was. They were just trying to get away with their thievery without having to risk going somewhere dangerous and exposed to steal what they needed, and yet there they were, crammed behind trees, watching part of their work being undone.

Behind them, the sound of wings flapping was another reason for concern, seeing as they’d tied up the three mounts they’d stolen and only one of them had still been in the clearing when things went wrong. There was no way that either of the others had gotten free behind their backs, and so they decided that watching the clearing was a lost cause and that they needed to check on their other stolen goods. Just beyond the forest they were standing in was another clearing, although this one was bordered on one side by a large, steep cliff, and once they were able to see down into its depths they were able to see where they’d been working on boxing the mounts into crates for transportation.

Perched on one of the crates were a flock of birds (crows or ravens, the bandits weren’t sure), and on top of the other was a wyvern identical to the one they’d stolen. “Th-that’s not _possible_ ,” the leader of the bandits said, as his men charged to the crate they knew they’d put that wyvern in. “How did it get out? How did someone sneak back here without us knowing about it and get that beast outta its cage?”

None of his men were able to answer, as when they approached the crate an axe came swinging down on them, injuring or killing them outright. As they fell to the ground, the leader stared, shocked, at what he’d just sent his men to do, before shaking his head and approaching for himself. “This ain’t the time for jokes, guys. We’re here on official business, we don’t have the time to be playin’ around like that.” When he got to the crate he too saw what they all had seen, someone dressed in black from head to toe, with a mask covering their eyes and a bandana over their mouth, but before he could yell anything at this intruder the axe came down swiftly on him, knocking him out cold like his men before him.

“There’s no reason to capture innocent wyverns,” the lone person left standing said, his voice cold and flat, and he glared down at the bodies surrounding him for a moment before returning to hacking his way through the crate with his axe, trying to rescue what was hidden within it.

From up on the other crate, the wyvern sitting there began flapping its wings again, to alert its rider that someone was on their way. He sighed, dropping his axe to his side and carelessly stomping on the bodies of the fallen as he went to where he’d left his own mount. “What’s the matter, I thought we’d taken care of all the bandits already,” he muttered, looking up to see what looked like a pegasus with two riders descending onto the clearing. His eyes narrowed as he tried focusing on seeing the riders, trying to tell if they were armed, but something about them made him take in a sharp breath, before whistling at his wyvern, which dropped to the ground and allowed for him to get on its back. “Those aren’t bandits, Minerva, but they’re almost as bad. Come, now, we must go!”

The appearance of the pegasus over the clearing came at the same time as the ascent of the wyvern, and the mount noticed that something was happening where its companions had been herded so it ditched landing to go investigate, to the surprise of its riders. Cherche wasn’t one to not notice when things were suspicious, and a pegasus deciding to continue flying rather than landing as it was initially going to was nothing but suspicious. As they came over the small patch of trees to the second clearing, the pegasus re-entering its landing descent, she found herself recognizing the wyvern that was taking flight; in fact, she knew it incredibly, almost as well as family. “Minerva!” she called out, letting go of the reins and pushing off of Lon’qu’s back so that she could make one of the more risky choices in her life and jump from the pegasus to try and grab hold of the wyvern. Missing her mark entirely, because the wyvern’s rider had noticed what she was doing and steered his mount away at the last minute, she got as close as brushing a hand against one of the wyvern’s wings before she fell to the ground (although thankfully not a far fall at that point).

This left Lon’qu as the sole rider on the pegasus, and he was completely inexperienced with riding anything that flew. The pegasus seemed to recognize that the person steering had been the one to jump off, so it made a quick landing before bucking its remaining rider to the ground, knocking him first into one of the crates in the clearing before he hit the ground, almost as hard of an impact as the one Cherche had been subjected to moments before. They were both rendered unconscious, and after seeing that both of its riders were no longer capable of leading it the pegasus took flight once more, heading back to where it had initially been freed to lead its savior to where she was needed now.

Panne wasn’t as open to jumping on the back of some winged beast when it approached her, but when it kept nudging her and bending down for her to be able to jump on, she found herself unable to keep denying it what it wanted. “You must feel obligated to show me something,” she said as she climbed onto its back, feeling a warmth underneath her that was stronger than the simple warmth of the pegasus’ life. “Did someone ride you before this? Are they any part of how you were captured?” To answer, the beast outstretched its wings and took to the sky, and even though she’d never ridden on pegasus-back before, Panne was comfortable enough to keep her eyes not focused in front of her, noticing that feathers were missing in spots all over its wings.

She didn’t have to say anything to register what that meant inside her mind, she knew that whatever had captured these beasts hadn’t been careful with caring for them when tying them up, and now she needed to free the others if she could. The flight was short, the pegasus taking Panne to the exact place it had lost its previous two riders, and when it landed it neighed in the direction of the two closed crates, hoping its insistence that she help would urge her to get a move on.

Instead, Panne noticed the two familiar people knocked out on the ground before she made any moves towards opening the crates. “What are you doing here?” she asked, jumping off the pegasus’ back and crouching down next to Cherche’s unconscious body. “Did the same bandits who harmed the pegasus bring you here? Did they take over the camp?” She placed a hand on Cherche’s shoulder and tried shaking her awake, to no avail. “Wake up and answer me, you have to explain!”

Behind her, the pegasus started neighing loudly, its eyes focused on what else was going on around them. It saw the crows on top of the crates, all cawing loudly, as well as the still-living bandits slowly stirring and collecting themselves from what had happened. The leader, his last memory being of the masked man attacking him, saw the rabbit woman he and his men had been watching from the forest and froze. “What’s she doing here? Does she think she’s got some business with us takin’ these mounts?” He reached for his weapon, a simple dagger attached to his belt, and once he grabbed it he detached it and immediately went to aim to target the new intruder on his territory.

His hand became heavy before he could throw it, however, and the added weight came with a loud caw right in his ear; one of the crows, seeing that Panne was the target of the attack, decided to find a new perch in an attempt to save her life. The bandit leader began cursing at the bird, trying to shake it off, and that was enough to draw her attention away from waking up her companion to see that there were several bandits just a few steps away. “Oh, I’m sure you man-spawn are the ones who have something to do with the abuse I’ve seen,” she grumbled, transforming into Taguel form to charge at the men, who had no idea what was coming for them until it was too late to do anything.

The crow that had landed on the dagger flew off into the night right before the attack, its friends all following after it in a cloud formation, heading off to the person they normally hung around in the nighttime. The bandits who had found it within themselves to get up when Panne arrived weren’t going to be getting up ever again once she was done with them, and those birds needed to share the good news of the death and destruction the woman had caused with her brute strength. And the two beasts contained in the crates were soon freed, once their captors were finished off for good, a few heads rolling so far that they fell off of the cliff’s edge bordering the clearing.

Unable to open the crates in a normal way, Panne broke them open while still in Taguel form, not noticing that one of the two crates looked like someone had already tried opening it through force. Once freed, the second pegasus quickly sidling up to the one that hadn’t ever been trapped so they could assure each other they were fine. Minerva didn’t hang around them, instead choosing to fly to her owner and start nudging for her to wake up. After transforming back to her human form, Panne was there with her, focusing entirely on Cherche and trying to get her back awake. “This must be so concerning to you,” she said to the wyvern, getting a roar in return. “Your master’s out cold and you’ve been trapped against your will, what monsters those bandits were to cause all of this…”

Minerva roared again, this time louder and more directed at Cherche than the person who had been speaking to her. “She will come around in due time, I’m positive she will. Otherwise, we will have to drag her back to camp and explain to everyone what’s happened, and not everyone will take the word of a wyvern as explanation.”

On the ground behind them, woozy as he’d just woken up from his own fall, Lon’qu reached towards his head and found the back of it bloodied from how he’d hit it against the crate. Cursing under his breath, he brought himself to sitting, only to see the wings of a wyvern blocking his vision. The last thing he remembered was the wyvern rider that Cherche had jumped off the pegasus to try and grab, and his eyes narrowed at the thought, but this wyvern didn’t seem to have that rider. In fact, the only person he could see had distinct, long ears that were definitely Panne’s. “What happened to the person on the wyvern?” he asked, voice gravelly as he spoke. “You must know, if you’ve managed to get here.”

Her heart nearly stopped at the shock hearing him gave her, but Panne wasn’t going to let him know that she hadn’t noticed he was there until right then. “Unfortunately for you, I have no idea what or who you’re speaking of. I freed this wyvern from her cage myself, and she is working just as hard as I am to get her rider back awake. There has never been a person riding her since she got here, as far as I am aware.”

“Of course you didn’t see them, that’s how it always goes, isn’t it?” He could feel the blood dripping down his head, beading down the back of his neck, but he didn’t want to keep touching it and dirtying up the wound more than being passed out on the ground would have. “Whatever, I suppose she’ll appreciate that they didn’t get away with her wyvern whenever she wakes up.”

“I said this wyvern was locked up, did you ignore that part of what I said to berate me however you want?” Panne hadn’t forgotten that she was only outside because she’d gotten sick, and she still didn’t feel completely back to normal, and she knew that Lon’qu was the one who was always in charge of the potatoes when it came to dinner. She knew that, even if it wasn’t intentional, he had some part in her having to get wrapped up in the entire mess—but before she could say anything to remind him of that fact, she realized that without her getting sick, there wouldn’t have been this scene they were currently in. No one would have found the mounts missing, she wouldn’t have rescued anything, and the Shepherds would have been completely unaware that bandits had raided them until it was far too late to do anything. With that in mind, she sighed and stopped focusing on Cherche, letting Minerva keep roaring at her owner to try waking her up, and she stepped back to be near Lon’qu instead. “My apologies for that, I wasn’t thinking with what I said. You have the right to be upset with me, I suppose.”

“You suppose? Whatever.” He moved away from her as she approached, still not wanting to be near her no matter what her intentions were. “What matters right now is that we found you and we found the mounts, now we can all go back to camp and pretend none of this ever happened tonight.”

She was inclined to agree, but the smell of blood filled her nose and she cringed. “By chance, are you bleeding?” she asked, trying to get closer to him only for him to continue moving away, giving her a very curt nod as his answer. “Gods, we need to get you back to the camp if you are. I have no idea what herbs and natural remedies I can access out here, we will have to rely on healing magic to stitch you up.”

“Don’t worry about me, there are others you need to concern yourself with more.” Standing up, Lon’qu felt the world shifting rapidly underneath his feet but chalked it up to the head injury he’d sustained. “You focus on getting her awake and back to camp, I will…” He looked to the two pegasi, both of which were still brushing up against each other, and he cringed at what he realized he’d have to do. “I will direct them back to camp and then get the, ahem, magic to stitch me up as you have suggested.”

“Direct them? How do you suppose you’ll do that?” Having not seen him riding one of the pegasi earlier, it came as a complete surprise to Panne when he explained that he would do just that in order to get them back to the stable where they belonged. She had a hard time believing what he said, but decided that arguing with him about it was not the appropriate course of action. “Go on, if you plan on riding one of them back you should do it now before your injury gets much worse. I will return to camp when we are able to all leave this place.”

He stood up as she went back to trying to get Cherche awake, and he had to psyche himself up to get on the back of one of the pegasi, hoping it was the one he’d ridden before. It didn’t take kindly to him being who was on its back, but it seemed to understand that getting out of that clearing was more important than judging who was in the saddle. Even still, it took off too fast and nearly threw him off its back mid-flight, but it and its companion were able to make it back to camp with him safely, allowing for him to find the first healer possible (or so he’d claim, but he intentionally went and avoided the female healers to be tended to by a male one).

It wasn’t too long until Cherche came to, her first sight when she woke up her wyvern’s head pressing into her chest. “Why, hello there Minerva,” she greeted, her wyvern giving a happy sound in return. “What happened to that person that I saw riding you before?”

“I had to explain this to Lon’qu when he awoke, there was no man or woman on her as she was trapped in a crate when I got here.” Now that she’d heard both of them give that same story, Panne was concerned that she’d missed something before she’d been summoned to this second clearing, but as far as she knew there hadn’t been a man, and there hadn’t been anyone there but them and those now-dead bandits. “She has been worried sick for you, she hasn’t left your side since I freed her.”

“That would be why seeing a stranger, dressed in all-black and with their face covered, atop her when we got to the clearing was so shocking to me. But no matter, she seems unharmed and that rider didn’t get away with her.” Cherche sat up, nuzzling Minerva as quickly as she could. “Now that I have you back, I shall speak with Chrom and the tactician to see about harsher stable rules for when we are at camp, I never want to deal with the fear of losing my dearest friend again.”

“In order to do that, you do need to get back to camp first,” Panne reminded her with a laugh, something she didn’t think she’d be doing that night after the bad things she’d had to go through. “Which, on that note, would you mind providing a ride back for me? I can’t exactly say I know my way back to camp on my own, as I was running through the woods dealing with…issues the whole way.”

“Oh yes, a ride can most definitely be provided. I have some apologizing I must do to you, it’d be best done somewhere where only you, I, and Minerva are there to witness it.” The smile on Cherche’s face was empty as it always was, but seeing it made Panne happy that she’d been able to save something so important for this woman. After a few minutes of checking the area to make sure the bandits hadn’t gotten off with anything more than just the mounts, the two got on Minerva’s back and spent a fair amount of time above the forest, talking freely to one another while they were airborne.

The sight of the wyvern in the sky was noticed by all other people searching for their missing friend, and slowly everyone came back to the stable to see that the two pegasi, missing some feathers on their wings but otherwise unharmed, had returned. When the wyvern landed and the two ladies got off, they knew that their searching had ultimately ended up being a success, even if it seemed it was the same person who’d found both the mounts and Panne, never mind the fact that it had been Panne who’d found the mounts and one of her own search parties.

Aside from those missing feathers and the strange head injury Lon’qu had come back to camp with, no one sustained any lasting damage from the ordeal, and things were able to go back to a relative normalness after that. The rest of the Shepherds, relatively unaware of the specifics of what had gone wrong, were able to pretend like nothing _had_ ever gone wrong, and they were able to ignore the lingering effects of what had happened for as long as possible. It didn’t do a single thing to the kitchen schedule, although everyone preparing meals for the entire army had to be twice as careful how they made their food, and the harsher regulations on mount storage lasted for about a week before it became too much to keep up with.

As they moved around from new campsite to new campsite, things went back to how they always were, and that was just the reality of how life with the Shepherds was. It was almost like that night in the woods hadn’t done a thing for anyone—and really, what was it supposed to have done?

Still, for those who had been affected by the stealing of the mounts, there was one question that remained unanswered: why had that been done in the first place? Every time they came across rogue armies or bands of bandits, the assumption that they were the ones responsible for what had happened came to the minds of anyone who’d heard what had happened to the mounts. Panne was particularly invested in the solving of that crime, to the point that she almost attacked her own future child in the heat of battle, thinking that he was one of the bandits who might have been related to the case. While he wasn’t, and he was only slightly scarred by the experience of her charging at him at full speed, he also wasn’t able to say anything about that particular band of bandits.

Solving that mystery might not ever have been solved, if it weren’t for four people aligned with the Shepherds that, unbeknownst to them, held the key to the riddle. It only required the aftermath of a meal gone wrong, being in multiple wrong places at all the right times, and a bunch of good wings to lead them in the right direction.


	5. Life-Changing and Dramatic

But what about Henry and Sumia? They’d last been involved by splitting off in their search for Panne, and their contributions were slim to none as they’d gotten hopelessly distracted in each other’s company. And although they had made it back to camp safe and sound, and had been part of following events, what had happened between them was undeniable: they had fallen in love with one another. Hard, too. Within a matter of weeks the were inseparable, always wanting be at the other’s side in battle even if it wasn’t for the best interest of the overall group.

It seemed that, in her attempt to try and get things fixed for poor Lon’qu and his distaste for women, Sumia had managed to find her soulmate; and in his attempt to bring closure to a complete mistake, Henry had managed to find the one person in the Shepherds who could stomach his joking nature with a smile. They were made for each other, and everyone who saw them in those weeks following their outdoor adventure knew it. Which, as this was a small army, that meant everyone was aware of the romance brewing there.

What came next was predictable, as the group stumbled into a town that already seemed to know who they were, despite none of them having ever been there before. The cause was a band of thugs and bandits posing as the Shepherds, causing trouble and throwing dirt on everyone’s reputations. For the few who knew about the mounts being stolen by bandits, fighting this band of them made perfect sense—after all, it was going to give them the closure for why that happened as well as it would let them know that those thugs wouldn’t ever have the chance to do it again.

Everything fell apart the moment they stepped onto the battlefield to see bandits none of them recognized, all posing as people they were allies with in bad costumes and possessing even worse impersonations. How anyone would be deceived by these loons was beyond any of them, but the truth was that people had been deceived, and so they needed to pay for what they’d done. But certain members of the Shepherds had their own agenda for the battle, trying to worm out the reasoning for the flying mount thefts, and others still were distracted by something else entirely.

Yes, that was Henry and Sumia that were distracted, but they weren’t distracted by each other being in any proximity. There’d been someone that had caught Henry’s eye on the other side of the battle, seemingly roped in by the bandits for whatever reason, that had looked strikingly familiar to him in a way he couldn’t place. “We have to go see what’s up with that, obviously,” he told Sumia, hopping up on the back of her pegasus when she nodded in agreement. “That girl had some pretty cool hair, and some nice wings she was riding on, she’s got to be impersonating you!”

“Impersonating…me? But why would anyone do that?” Sumia looked confused at the development, but when she saw Henry still glancing around trying to find someone else that looked familiar, she knew she wasn’t going to get a straight answer out of him. “Okay, well, since you found her, I guess we should go tell her to stop that. Out of all the Shepherds, I’m probably the least worth copying, what’s even special about me?”

“Don’t get me started on that, I could talk you to death about all your special traits!” Letting loose a chuckle, Henry pointed in the direction he’d last seen the girl with one hand, while grabbing a tome in the other. “Let’s just go teach her and all her little friends a lesson they won’t soon forget: a lesson in hurting!” The chuckling turned into full-blown cackling as they took flight and separated from the rest of the group, which was aiming at taking the bandits’ leader out first and then silencing anyone who dared keep up what they were doing.

After navigating part of a battlefield rife with archers and people trying to take down the pegasus they were on, they came upon the girl with her own pegasus, her eyes wide with wonder as she watched them approach. “Who goes there, you evil copycats!” she called out, brandishing her lance as she pulled tightly on her pegasus’ reins to get it to rear up, an intimidation tactic that wasn’t going to work. “How dare you come near me while choosing to play the role of my parents! Speak now to explain yourselves, or…or…I’ll kill you!”

“Did she say kill us?” Henry asked, at the exact moment Sumia had looked at him asking, “Wait, did she say parents?” As they’d both given a question, there was a moment’s hesitation as they thought about what the other had said, time during which the girl came closer, her weapon still at the ready.

“Why aren’t you doing anything? Aren’t you scared of dying?” The girl sounded so convinced that she was in the right at the moment, and her voice was full of conviction. “I told you once to speak, so do it!”

They were still looking between each other, trying to make sense of what was happening to them in that moment, but when the girl made a jab at them with her lance, she had it knocked right out of her hand by Sumia deftly using her own weapon for disarming, not injuring. “Hold on, you’ve said some things we’re trying to make sense of and it’s rather rude to try killing us now, isn’t it?”

“Hmm, you’re awfully convincing for being a poor copycat of my mother,” the girl said, stroking her chin with her now-empty hand. “No one else would be able to disarm me so quickly, and you even talk to me with the same voice as her. You must have trained really hard to be able to be her!”

The reality that this girl might have just been a tiny bit misguided but working with something important was setting in, and it was time to figure out how to approach that idea without sounding completely crazy. “You know, everyone else has found a kid of theirs from the future, what if this girl here’s the proof that we’re meant to be together?” Henry suggested, his voice low so that the girl didn’t hear him. “What if she’s here to tell us, ‘hey! Guess what? You’re going to make babies someday, and here I am now!’ What if she’s not crazy and she’s actually our kid?”

“Stop whispering without me, you evil-doer!” the girl yelled, moving the hand that had been cupping her chin to around her mouth instead, so that her voice was amplified. “You might think you can pretend to be my father, but only one man in the whole world’s my real dad and you’re not him!”

“Not him…yet.” The dramatic pause Henry took when he said that, stopping talking as low as he was, just so that the girl could hear him after all. She seemed surprised to hear him make that suggestion, but her offensive stance was loosening up, she wasn’t holding so tightly to her pegasus’ reins anymore. “You’ve got to know about all that, right? Kids come back looking for their old flock, straggling along like a bunch of abandoned baby birds looking for their nests.”

“I might know of something like that.” The girl’s face looked thoughtful, as she went through all the possibilities of what was currently happening to her. “But that doesn’t matter, there’s no way you two are actually my parents! I’m _with_ the Shepherds right now, I—“

She was cut off by a scream that had all three of them looking for the source, which was a celebratory one from Chrom as he held up his sword, which even from the distance they were at they could tell it was coated in something that wasn’t normally on it. “You’re being taken over by the Shepherds, you must have joined the band of impostors thinking they were the real deal.” With every word she’d said, Sumia understood the gravity of what was going on, but she had to keep pressing forward. This was her time to be involved in what everyone else already had gotten to go through! “But they’re not, we are, and I guess that means you’re my future daughter?”

“ _Our_ future daughter,” Henry corrected, before realizing what he’d said and nearly throwing himself off the pegasus for it. He did eventually get off and run to the girl’s side, excitement in every stride. “Oh gods, you’re ours and we’re yours and you have to come fight on our side, pretty please? I’d hate to have to kill my own child!”

The girl seemed to be going to along with what was happening, and she nodded at the suggestion that she fight on their side. “Of course I’m going to join you! I’m a hero, I don’t fight for the bad guys!”

“Aw, she’s perfect already! We’re keeping her, right?” Trying to climb onto the girl’s pegasus to sit with her, Henry watched as Sumia nodded slowly, unsure as to why she was having to tell him yes to what he’d just asked. “Awesome! Now tell us everything about yourself right now, starting with name and age and maybe when your birthday is? I don’t know, just the thought of having a kid is so exciting, especially since that means you were a baby once, and that means that I have a baby at some point.” He stopped for a moment as both Sumia and the girl laughed at him, their laughter rather similar and showing the familial bond they had. “I mean, I myself won’t have a baby, unless we figure out how that magic works, but you get what I’m saying, right?”

“Yes, I do, I really do!” The girl allowed for him to climb on and she let her pegasus head to stand side-by-side with her mother’s, so that she could look between her two parents easily. “My name’s Cynthia, I don’t know how long I’ve been around here so I don’t know how old I am, but don’t worry because I know I’m not super old!” She laughed again, which made both of her parents laugh as well, and they spent the next several minutes doing introductions that were only halted when the rest of the army approached them and asked what they were doing. At the end of the day, Cynthia was recruited just like all the future children before her had been, and everything seemed to be falling perfectly in place for the happy couple of Sumia and Henry, who now knew that their nighttime adventure had been fated from the start.

But for everyone else who’d been involved in that evening’s events, the battle against the bandits had them coming up empty-handed in regards to what information they were looking for. This had just been a band of thugs who were looking to cause trouble by stealing people’s identities, they’d never actually met the Shepherds to any capacity before that, and so they couldn’t have been behind the attempted theft of the mounts that night.

However, the defeat of those bandits sent ripples through the criminal world that the real Shepherds were around putting an end to activity they didn’t like, and that was enough to get the real culprits back in action. Little did they know, though, that the masked man who’d helped put a stop to the initial crimes was still around, watching, waiting, for the right time to strike.

* * *

The wyvern valley was said to be one of the most beautiful places any lover of the dragon mounts could go, and Cherche was rightfully excited every time being near it was brought up. This time it wasn’t an exciting reason to hear about it, as word had reached Chrom and his tactician that a group of bandits had entered the valley and were causing trouble there. The call was made for them to put a stop to the behavior, and while no one had mentioned if the bandits were trying to steal wyverns, the idea that they were cropped up in people’s minds, even the minds of those who didn’t know that had already happened.

“Hopefully we get there and there are not too many injured wyverns,” Cherche told herself as the army headed into the valley. “I don’t know if my heart or Minerva’s would be able to handle seeing something like that.”

“Don’t worry, it will all be fine, I can assure you.” Walking next to Cherche and her wyvern and keeping relatively good pace with them, Panne was trying to focus her attention on her hearing, so that she could know if there were any rumblings of thievery being mentioned. That was how she’d managed to hear Cherche’s comment, and although she knew she shouldn’t have addressed it she had anyway. “We will get in there and put a stop to the criminal activity, then everything will be okay.”

“You sound so sure of yourself, but I have no reason to not believe you. After all, you’re looking for the same answers I am, whether you mean to or not.” The smile Cherche gave was as emotionless as always, but when she laughed it had a genuine feeling of amusement to it. “Let’s hope all goes well while we’re here, I don’t know if I have it in me to see a mass slaughter of such beautiful beasts.”

None of the wyverns seemed to be harmed at the moment, but the valley was swarming with bandits when they arrived, and the Shepherds got to work quickly, splitting up to take everyone out as fast as they could without causing harm to the surrounding wyverns. For a moment, it seemed like Cherche and Panne weren’t going to get any closure on what they were looking for, even with encountering bandits doing exactly what they’d witnessed before, but that changed when they saw, standing off to the side of the action, a masked figure with a wyvern underneath him.

As her mind was relatively clear when she’d been in that forest that night, Panne could remember the questions she was asked about a masked person messing around with the mounts, and she gasped when she saw that figure. “Cherche, look,” she said, directing the woman next to her to look at the person she was trying to get a read on. “Didn’t you tell me that night that you saw someone like that?”

Cherche nodded, directing Minerva to carry her towards the person before they had a chance to escape. The person was watching them intently, and when they started to approach they got into a defensive position, unarmed but ready to flee at a moment’s notice. “Go away, I am not who you are looking for,” they said, their voice rough and masculine. “You have issues to handle involving the bandits here, as do I. We are allies in this mission but I would rather you not interact with me.”

“If we’re allies, why be so against working with us?” Cherche asked, before looking at the wyvern the man (she figured he was a man, based on his style of armor and the way he was seated) was riding. Her eyes narrowed as she saw familiar features, ones that she recognized as belonging to her own wyvern. “And why, tell me, does your wyvern look identical to mine? You…you’re the man from that clearing, aren’t you?”

“I was trying to stop the thieves then, and I’ll be trying to stop them again today. Leave me alone if you know what’s best for you.” This man was not going to make things easy in regards to interacting with him, and when Cherche went to open her mouth to ask another question, he jerked his wyvern up into the sky to leave the scene. “Come now, Minerva, we must get away from this woman.”

Thinking quickly about what to do, Cherche also directed her wyvern to the skies, apologizing to her ground-bound companion about what she was doing. “I have to follow him, he knows what happened that evening and we need answers.” She neglected to mention that she was invested because of the coincidence that the two wyverns looked the same and shared a name, but Panne could assume that had a lot to do with it. Even without that, she wasn’t going to blame her for chasing the man down, not when he had apparently been there the night the crime happened.

Chasing the man down was easy, when their mounts were identical, and she followed him as he weaved and dodged, taking out a weapon so that he could attack bandits as they approached them in the skies. “Please, for your own sake stop following me!” he called out behind him, trying to deter her from following longer. “It makes no sense for you to waste your time with me, go bother someone else!”

“I need you to answer my questions about that night!” she responded, sounding more invested in this than most things in life. “You’re the only one I know of who was there that may have answers, could you please stop being so difficult about this and assist me, even for two seconds?”

He turned his head to look back at her, hoping his wyvern would know what to do and where to fly. “I’m not assisting you with anything, you do not need me in your life and I would rather not be in yours.”

“And why might that be?” She didn’t mean to sound like she was grilling him on his aversion to her, but because of her nature that was how it came out. He stared at her for a second, his eyes barely visible through the holes of his mask, before turning back around and making a dive for the ground, her following right behind. They nearly collided as they reached the bridge beneath them, him jumping off his wyvern’s back and landing in the exact spot she was trying to steer her wyvern to go, and once she was able to safely avoid him she reached out and grabbed his arm before he could escape. “No, you got away last time without giving me answers, today you will speak.”

As they went back and forth about his refusing to say anything of note and her insisting that he did, Panne saw where they had landed and started to make her way towards them, transforming into her Taguel form so that she could travel faster. Before she really got on her way, however, she knew there was another person she needed to get involved in the situation. Approaching Lon’qu was easy, and he didn’t seem to mind that one of the giant rabbits had gotten close to him, but when she transformed and he saw that it was her and not her son, his mouth creased into a straight line. “Panne. What do you think you’re doing getting so close to me? Don’t you have a husband and child to fight alongside?”

“They’re fine without me, I was going to provide support for someone else before they got distracted with something.” Waving her hand at the specifics, she saw that he was not amused that she was giving excuses for why she was there and chose to get right to the point. “You need to come with me, we’ve found someone you may be interested in.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you, that’s unnecessary.” He pulled his sword from where it was hanging at his hip and pointed it towards her, causing her to inch backwards. “Tell me where it is you need me to go and I’ll consider it. An enemy, I suppose?”

“Quite the opposite, it’s that masked man from the night in the forest. The one I was certain you had made up.” She laughed, seeing him lower his sword and seem genuinely surprised that she’d given that answer. “If you have any words you’ve been saving for him, this would be the time to tell them to him.”

That had him on board with going, but she refused to tell him where this man was, insisting that she go with him to see the encounter. “No, you don’t need to come with me, I am perfectly capable of handling travel and interaction with a _man_ by myself.” His emphasis there proved that if this had been a woman they were talking about, he might have not been so interested in going; in fact, that was the exact reason why she was insisting on going in the first place, because she knew Cherche was still interacting with the man, and she also knew that Lon’qu would not want to be there if Cherche was there.

Eventually, he relented on his insistence that he go alone, mostly because Panne had transformed again and was infinitely more intimidating and bothersome when she was in beast form (not to mention the fact that she threated to throw him in the gorge). She remained as a beast as they headed towards the last location she’d seen Cherche and the masked man, making sure he was following right beside her every few moments, in case he decided he was going to make a break for it after all. He never tried, even though when it was clear that they were headed towards two identical wyverns he tensed up and his heart started racing for some reason.

“What, are you scared of talking with him? Or is it the fact that there’s a woman here?” she teasingly asked, hearing the uptick in his heartbeat. He hit her with the hilt of his sword in retaliation, and it took all of her self-control not to make good on the gorge-tossing threat right then. “Don’t resort to violence, you’re about to get your closure.”

They weren’t able to get close enough for him to get anything, though, because once the two people standing there came into perfect sight he froze up, refusing to move further. Cherche and the masked man both had turned to look at who was joining them, and Lon’qu was stuck seeing nothing but similarities in what part of their faces he could see. Their jawline was almost identical, just like the wyverns they had, and he was almost certain that if he heard this man speak his voice would be just as flat and emotionless as Cherche’s always was. Why this was something he was noticing, he wasn’t sure, but it was making him worried about what he’d just walked into.

“No one asked for him,” the masked man said, turning back to looking at Cherche instead of at Lon’qu. “Tell him to leave, he’s as much of a bother as you are.”

“Tell him yourself,” she replied, not looking away from Lon’qu as her mind was focusing on a different detail she’d noticed about this man during their discussion. That night when she’d encountered him in the clearing, it had been dark and he had been completely covered up, she had figured his hair was masked just as his face was. But now he was wearing less facial coverings than then, and his hair was the same deep, dark color as it had been that night, and she had just realized why that hair color was familiar to her.

Same wyvern as her, same jawline as her, same hair color as Lon’qu…it couldn’t just be a coincidence that those things matched up. “You don’t want to interact with either of us because we’re your parents.” Her words were barely whispered, and she was sure that no one, aside from Panne who was transforming back into her human form at the moment it was said, would have heard her. “What kind of disaster caused for this to happen?”

Unaware that she’d made the connection he was trying his hardest to avoid her making, the masked man got back on his wyvern and tried taking to the sky, but his mount refused to take flight. “What’s this, Minerva? You know how to fly, now do it. We need to leave here, right now.”

“Where does he think he’s going?” Panne asked, before nudging Lon’qu with a sharp elbow. “Go chase him down, you don’t want to lose this opportunity to set things clear in your mind, do you?”

Lon’qu could have sworn his feet were stuck to the ground where he stood, but Panne was right in that he didn’t want to miss out on getting to ask the guy why he’d been there and what role he had in that whole mess. After all, he wouldn’t have fallen off that pegasus had that man not been there, or if he hadn’t been so quick to disappear. “You, don’t leave until you let me speak with you!” he managed to spit out, still unable to get himself to approach any closer. “I have but one question for you.”

“I have even less desire to speak with you than I do with this woman here. Let me do as I please and let me leave.” If he were able to get his wyvern to fly away he would have already gone, but the wyvern stubbornly refused, keeping him grounded right where they were. “I don’t have anything of interest to either of you, and I would rather you not press further in this conversation.”

The aversion to discussing anything with them felt just as familiar to Lon’qu as the jawline of the man did, but this wasn’t a trait of Cherche’s that he was picking up on. It was a trait of his own, and that concerned him; it also gave him the strength to move forward, so that he could look at this man even closer, noticing for the first time the exact shade of his dark hair that matched his very own. It was a different way than how Cherche had made the realization, but he wasn’t chalking it up to coincidence, nor was he going to accept it. The other kids, they’d all come to them with their father’s hair color—the blue haired royal children, the greenish tuft on the top of Panne’s son’s head, the blonde pigtails Cordelia’s rude child had, the white hair belonging to Henry’s daughter—and this man sat before him with his father’s hair color too, didn’t he?

“You don’t want to speak with me because you were raised to resent me, weren’t you?” he asked, voice steady even though he was panicking on the inside. “You were raised to hate me because of who I am and who your mother is, and you want nothing to do with me now because of that, correct?”

“No, I want nothing to do with either of you because you’re not _my_ parents and I can do without you.” That was all it took for him to angrily kick at his wyvern’s side, getting her to finally fly up and get them away from the scene. Leaving right then was not the best idea on his behalf, because it left three stunned people in his wake, both Cherche and Lon’qu trying to understand that the man that had caused them both to fall unconscious in the woods was in fact their future child, while Panne was the witness to this surprising development.

He was disappearing over the cliffs of the valley before any of them knew what to do, and so they swore to keep what had transpired there between the three of them. They had already had to shoulder the burden of the events in that clearing between them, they could keep another secret, although this secret was rather large and kind of concerning for two of them as it meant that an alternate version of them had gotten together.

In the following weeks after the Shepherds had cleared out the bandits of the wyvern valley, everyone pretended that nothing had happened aside from taking down a criminal group that had tried to steal wyverns for their own personal gain. There was no mention of another future child coming around and vanishing before he could be recruited, or even before his name was known, and that was how the three people who knew about that were going to keep it.

That was, until one of the other children said something about it. “I can’t believe that we still haven’t found Gerome,” Cynthia said mid-conversation with her parents, causing them to look between each other in surprise. “When we were there with the wyverns, I figured we’d have found him easy-peasy. He’s got a wyvern of his own, that seemed like the perfect place for him to be hanging out.”

“A wyvern, huh? Sounds like he likes himself a good, strong pair of wings underneath him.” Henry laughed at what he just said, while Sumia started thinking about the implications of what Cynthia had brought to light. She didn’t say anything then, especially after they’d moved on in what they were talking about, but she did go to Cordelia later and mention that there was a missing child that was a mounted fighter that she’d heard about.

Cordelia, being the woman that she was, wasn’t going to sit on that information and she went straight to the sole lady left in the army who hadn’t been visited by their future child (to her knowledge). “You’ve got a son we’re looking for,” she casually mentioned after striking up talk of fighting while on the back of something in the air, “and we should probably try finding him so you can get married to his father and not be alone.”

“Oh, don’t worry about him, we’ve encountered each other already twice, he wants nothing to do with this army and I will gladly let him be on his own, as I want nothing to do with his supposed father.” Cherche spoke with her normal tone, which was not comforting in the slightest given what she was talking about. “It’s for the best that we do not try pursuing him, if he changes his mind he’ll come to us, I’m sure.”

He would come to them, eventually, and he ended up stumbling into the camp heavily injured during the meal preparation time, finding his way into the kitchen area and almost collapsing in front of where Lon’qu was slicing potatoes. He had to loudly cough to get any attention, and all Lon’qu did was look at him, acknowledge his presence, and tell him to get out of the kitchen while bleeding like he was because he’d spoil the meal.

This was something life-changing and dramatic happening to the one person in the world who wasn’t receptive to that sort of thing, and he didn’t give a single care at all. But at least someone got a happy ending out of it, even if it was the person hoping it would be Lon’qu getting one. As she watched him rejecting his child over at the ovens, Sumia shook her head and hoped that maybe someday he’d see the light about things.


End file.
